David Wessel

Interviewed by Ben Eltham of newmatilda.com, an Australian web site. Read it here.

I asked Wessel if the Federal Reserve was now politically unpopular in the United States as a result of the bailouts.

"Yeah the problem that the Fed has is that the best they can really tell us is ‘It could have been worse’. But that’s not very comforting in an economy like the US, where we have 10 per cent unemployment, where 25 per cent of the people that have mortgages have a house that is not worth as much as their mortgage, and so forth.

"The Fed is, as you point out, quite unpopular now, and I think that’s because they filled a vacuum and they did things that felt was necessary for the good of the economy, but to a lot of Americans it looks like they bailed out Wall Street and they didn’t bail out Main Street, so they are now paying the price for that."

    In Fed We Trust is a finalist for the Loeb award for the best business book of the year. Tough competition: Sorkin's Too Big to Fail and Ahamed's Lords of Finance. Full list of nominees here.

Was interviewed by Australian public broadcasting radio host Fran Kelly while in Sydney. Here is a video, yes, a video of a radio interview.

Spent an hour on stage with Paul Keating, the former prime minister of Australia, at the Sydney Writers' Festival. Here's a link to a video:

In Fed We Trust--by David Wessel, economics editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, is the inside story of Ben Bernanke, and his role in staving off another Depression. At the moment, Bernanke is up for confirmation for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve and he is getting attacked from the left and the right for his failings. If you want a truly fair and balanced view of Bernanke and a clear explanation of the inner workings of the Fed, this is the best single book to read. I had Wessel speak on the Oxy campus, and students told me it was one of the most informative talks on economics that they had ever heard.  Read his whole post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/derek-shearer/joy-to-the-world-good-by_b_380127.html

At 7 p.m. at Arlington Central Library auditorium, 1015 N Quincy St, Arlington, VA.

In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic
By David Wessel

The Wall Street Journal’s economics editor details the financial crisis of the past 15 months. Access to key players allows Wessel to draw up a balanced report. His conclusion? Without Bernanke things could have been much worse. Shortlisted for the 2009 FT/Goldman Sachs business book of the year.

See full list here

There’s a good reason why the three daily book critics for The New York Times don’t make 10-best lists at the end of the year: we can’t. None of us has read everything. Our reviewing assignments don’t overlap. None of us has an objective overview of the year’s best and most important books, but this is what we do have: favorites. They are books we have not only admired in the abstract but also enjoyed, recommended and given to friends.

'In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic'

By DAVID WESSEL

A lucid -- and riveting -- account of the financial meltdown of 2008 and the frantic efforts of the Fed chairman, the Treasury Secretary and a small group of associates to shore up the U.S. economy, as they tired to catch and stabilize one toppling fiscal domino after the next. (Crown Business, $26.99)

See the full list or  read Kakutani's August 09 review.

The definitive account of the financial meltdown of 2008–09 has not been written, and cannot be just yet because the story is unfinished. A degree of stability returned to financial markets this summer, but the system is still stressed and nobody can be sure what will happen next. The broader economy shows signs of recovery, but unemployment is high and likely to rise further, a prospect with political and economic implications still unknown.

By the autumn of 2009, only a small part of the huge fiscal stimulus deployed against the downturn in the U.S. had made itself felt. In monetary policy, the Federal Reserve and its counterparts intervened to support the banking and credit systems in new ways and on a wholly unprecedented scale. To call these interventions “unfinished business” would be putting it mildly. Meanwhile, not just the future is uncertain. The next surprise could change our understanding of what has happened so far, as earlier shocks already have.

Never mind: A crop of new books on the subject has already come to market. All were written under the pressure of short deadlines and fast-changing circumstances — and, as you might expect, many were worthless on arrival. But there are some splendid exceptions. The best books from this first crop are fine by any standard.

Among the successful books, the range of explanations for the crisis is wide. Some focus on economic policy, others on closely reported tales of greed and fallibility. One locates the root cause in the triumph of finance over manufacturing in the United States. Another asks whether capitalism itself stands condemned. Just as the crisis had no single source, there is no single way to best tell what happened. This makes it hard to say which book is best. Nonetheless, if forced to choose just one, I would pick David Wessel’s In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Panic — an excellent work on a crucial aspect of the story, and one that addresses my professional interest in economic policy.

-- Clive Crook in Winter 2009 issue of  Strategy + Business

The German version of "In Fed We Trust" is out: Die große Panik:Das Wettrennen zur Rettung der Weltwirtschaft (The Great Panic: The Battle to Save the World Economy)
For more information, click here